[hartpuff]

> The CIA is a sickening and surprisingly amateurish organisation. Their actions over the past decades have ruined the United States' international moral authority.

I'm not even sure that's true. I think the perception of the CIA (perhaps due to generally positive portrayals of it on TV and in movies) is completely different to, say, the perception people have of the Stasi or KGB.

And yet did those organizations, which people rightly consider to be bad, actually do anything worse than the CIA has been doing in the last 70 years?

[Cthulhu_]

Behold, the effects of propaganda. I'd really like to see some solid research in how much the CIA or US government funds TV shows and movies to portray those organizations as the good guys, or whether it's more due to patriotism or whatever it is that makes a movie-maker portray organizations like that as good or bad.

[rm_-rf_slash]

Hah, good luck with that. One of the reasons the CIA is so effective is that it essentially self-funds the activities it doesn't want the public prying into. The agency makes its own investments and uses the profits as needed.

We usually think of this as a drugs-for-arms Iran-Contra-type of affair, but for most spy agencies, real estate is the way to go: it's easy to obfuscate ownership, the value tends to hold or rise, and nobody's gonna steal your condominium when you're not looking.

Sarasota FL has an interestingly high concentration of expensive property and people with clandestine connections. (It also has one of the highest rates of climate change denial, a thought for another time) "He works in real estate" is a common implication.

So to answer your question, how much propaganda does the CIA fund:

You will never, ever know.

[cmdkeen]

Yes both in terms of degree and scale. In my mind the CIA's actions are morally indefensible but still pale in comparison to what those organisations got up to. Even if you throw in the FBI in its darkest days under Hoover you don't get close to the tyranny the KGB inflicted.

It is going to take Western history a long time to get over its Communist apologists like Hobsbawm and be willing to fully accept the horrors that system spawned.

[pdonis]

> did those organizations, which people rightly consider to be bad, actually do anything worse than the CIA has been doing in the last 70 years?

Yes, they did.

[ikeboy]

>And yet did those organizations, which people rightly consider to be bad, actually do anything worse than the CIA has been doing in the last 70 years?

The average American is not personally affected by anything the CIA does. Can the same be said about the KGB?

[pjc50]

You'd be hard pressed to find an instance where an average American civilian was affected by the KGB per se. Remember that most of the Cold War was a proxy war, fought in the middle east and South America.

The FSB their successor did assassinate a dissident in London (Litvinenko), which the UK government ignored until Russia became sufficiently persona non grata lately.

[ikeboy]

I meant to ask whether the average Russian was affected by the KGB.

[hartpuff]

AIUI the CIA is not supposed to operate domestically, so the comparison between the two is not exact (I don't believe the CIA would operate domestically the same way as the KGB did anyway, though, but the KGB was basically just helping to prop up an openly tyrannical state), but even if the KGB has the CIA beat on home turf, I think the CIA 'wins' abroad.

Even just taking the example in this thread, a monstrous program of 'black sites' set up around the world specifically to torture innocent people indefinitely, where is the KGB version?

Leaving aside any comparisons, if they're a distraction, why is an organization that does the terrible things the CIA has done throughout its history not only tolerated in a civilized democracy, but actually still viewed generally positively?

[ikeboy]

> a monstrous program of 'black sites' set up around the world specifically to torture innocent people indefinitely

I'm pretty sure everyone involved thought the person was not innocent. This is not a fair description.

Also, as far as I can tell the claim is just that he wasn't part of al-Qaida or some of the other stuff he was accused of, not that he's completely innocent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Zubaydah#Biography_and_ear...

>Zubaydah eventually became involved in the jihad training site known as the Khalden training camp, where he oversaw the flow of recruits and obtained passports and paperwork for men transferring out of Khalden.

[pjc50]

I'm pretty sure everyone involved thought the person was not innocent.

This is always true of almost everyone arrested by the police: they're arrested because they're suspects. Suspicion is not grounds for torture. Guilt is not grounds for torture either! That's what the 8th Amendment is about.

Torture is, in and of itself, a crime against humanity under international law and the laws of war. This is not a theoretical point, it was used in the post-WW2 war crimes trials to prosecute even low-ranking staff who were involved in systematic torture. The Allies executed people for torture.

[hartpuff]

I was thinking more generally, about the fact that these sites are set up and used specifically to avoid due process. I mean by definition, the people being tortured, not having been found guilty of any crime, are innocent.